Development

Tagging Images with Flow and Azure Vision API - Part I

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash This time, in our continuing adventures with Microsoft Flow and the Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, we’re using the Vision API to tag image files. The flow will pass the Vision API image files from OneDrive and update the image files with the list of auto-generated meta tags the service returns to us. Part I will walk through the creation of the flow, getting the tags and adding them to the file. Part II will build on that flow to add checks for duplicate tags and applying domain knowledge to identify things like celebrities and landmarks in our flow.

Monday, August 5, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-OCR

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels Last time we looked at generating thumbnail images via the Vision Service. This time we’re going to look at using the service to get text out of a photograph of a document utilizing the the Vision Service’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. Button, Button We’re going to use a Flow button trigger from the Flow phone app to start this flow. In Microsoft Flow, select New -> Instant - From blank. Give it a name and select “From Microsoft Flow”.

Thursday, August 1, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-Thumbnails

In the past, I’ve played around with some pieces of Azure Cognitive Services surrounding text recognition. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to take a look at some things you can do with the Vision Service and ways we can integrate that with Flow. For this first post, we’re going to use the Vision service to create a thumbnail of our image. There are any number of reasons that you might want to generate thumbnail images for a file. One example would be a company that is putting together an online product catalog or online store. For most situations like this, every product will need one or more full size images and a thumbnail to match each one. For example, when you look at a product on Amazon, there will be a series of thumbnail images along the left side of the product page. Hovering over or clicking on an image will display the full size version.

Monday, July 29, 2019 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow: Converting Feed Categories to Hashtags

In a number of previous posts starting with this one, I’ve covered ways to use Microsoft Flow to post to to your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds when you publish a blog post. One thing I haven’t covered in those posts is doing something with your categories. This time, we’ll walk through adding steps to our flow to convert the categories from our blog post into hashtags for our Twitter and LinkedIn posts.

Thursday, July 25, 2019 | 3 minutes Read

Remember to initialize your Dynamics 365 Retail RCSU

I was running into an issue setting up a Dynamics 365 F&O Retail Point of Sale in a UAT environment for a client and was running into all sorts of weird problems and errors. Things would work sometimes, but more often would just fail for what seemed like nonsensical reasons. Digging into each error seemed to lead me in circles. Having taken over this deployment from another developer I made the (faulty) assumption about some of the initial setup that had taken place.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019 | 1 minute Read

UPDATE: Microsoft Flow: Posting to LinkedIn

In a previous post, I showed how to post to LinkedIn about a blog post. The connector available at that time used V1 of the LinkedIn API. That version no longer works. Thankfully, Flow already has added support for the LinkedIn V2 API, and it’s a simple swap of steps to replace V2 for V1. Add a new step just below your “Share an article” step. Search for LinkedIn. Make sure you select LinkedIn V2 and not the other one.

Monday, July 22, 2019 | 1 minute Read

Microsoft Flow: Feeding Forms data to Dynamics 365 CRM

One of the most universal pieces of any company website is the “Contact Us” page. There are countless ways this is handled. At the simplest it can just open a mailto link. Sometimes there’s an inline form of some sort that feeds into some app somewhere. A lot of times it will require someone along the process to take the data from that form and copy/paste it into the whatever Customer Relationship Management system the company uses.

Thursday, July 18, 2019 | 5 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow for Expiration Dates pt. 2

In the previous Flow post, I walked through using Flow to set up reminders for things you need to keep track of, like expiration dates, renewal dates and so forth. In this follow up, I’ll walk through creating a weekly process that emails you a list of upcoming reminders so you know what’s coming in the future. Trigger We’ll start by creating a blank Flow. For our Trigger, we’re going to select a Schedule. Search for “Recurrence” and select that. For this example, I’m going to set the trigger to run on Sunday evenings at 6pm local time. That’s the time I’m starting to think about the coming week, so it’s a good time to remind myself of what’s coming up. For my Flow, I’ve selected the following parameters:

Monday, February 4, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow For Expiration Dates

We all have a near endless list of expiration and reminder dates to keep track of: software renewals, contracts, driver’s license, certifications, warranties, and on and on. Or maybe we want a better way of seeing when that pesky doctor or vet appointment is without scrolling endlessly through our calendar. Keeping track of all those dates is a constant hassle. If we’re lucky, we get an email or snail-mail a few weeks ahead of time. But how many of us could tell what’s coming up in next 6 weeks or 6 months? In this post and the next, we’re going to create two new Flows to make it easy for us to keep track of those on-rushing dates of import that we need to keep track of.

Monday, January 21, 2019 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Manually Triggering a Flow

My previous articles on Flow have all had external Triggers of some kind: a blog post, a tweet, a timer and so forth. There are times when you want to have a Flow that you can trigger on demand. One solution to that is to use a Flow button. The Flow mobile app for iOS and Android has a menu tab (currently the middle of the menu options) called “Buttons”. When you create a Flow that is started by a button Trigger, a button will appear in your app allowing you to trigger the Flow.

Thursday, January 3, 2019 | 7 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Adding Some Delay

In a previous post, I walked through saving tweets to an Azure table so they could be retweeted later with an #ICYMI tag. As with most processes of learning, we do the hard way first to learn the concepts. And then we learn the easier ways to do it. As it so happens, Flow provides a much easier way to do this. We’re going to add some delay. One of the Actions available in Flow is the Delay Action. This pauses the execution of a Flow for whatever amount of time you specify. So instead of saving our tweet to a storage table, we’re going to replace that part of the Flow with a delay and a tweet post after the delay.

Friday, December 21, 2018 | 3 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow Conference

If you didn’t catch it, the Microsoft Flow team ran an 8 hour online conference with a bunch of different Flow presenters talking about a bunch of different ways to use Flow. It’s a lot of amazing content. You can catch it all on YouTube, broken up into 4 2-hour blocks. There are a couple of presenters where the audio had some issues, but overall it was a lot of fantastic content.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018 | 1 minute Read